About The Novel

Raves & Praise

"Beautifully detailed and rich in exceptional characterization ... Curran's novel gently reminds readers that fantasy has a place in everyone's life, and dreams can come true. Uniquely uplifting and never didactic, this is a gem." -BOOKLIST, starred review

"With a masterful wit and clever twists, Sheila Curran has created an intricately woven mystery. Captivating, fast-paced, no-holds-barred storytelling, DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN defies pigeon-holing. Wrestling the complexities of motherhood, loss and betrayal, politics, the environment, and theme parks, it is at once intimate, domestic, and worldly. A debut to celebrate!" -Julianna Baggott, GIRLTALK, THE MISS AMERICA FAMILY, THE MADAM

"Brilliant, touching, and funny as hell, Diana Lively packs a powerful punch. A poignant and biting satire of contemporary family life, American business, ivory-tower academics, and trans-Atlantic cultural differences, this spirited romp through an Englishwoman's Arizona deserves a unique place of honor on any bookshelf. Diana is one of those stories that can linger forever in one's own memory and imagination, as a reference point for every new book that comes along, or even more, for life itself. Wry, engaging, and wise beyond words, Diana is bound to delight and amaze." -Carlos Eire, 2003 National Book Award winner, WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA

"DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN is a terrific pick-me-up. You couldn't find two more disparate landscapes than Oxford, England and Arizona, and that's exactly what one British woman discovers when she crosses the pond to find herself a fish-out-of-water -- only to realize that for the first time in her life, this means she can stand on her own two feet. Filled with characters who make you laugh out loud even as they break your heart, this is a funny, warm, inventive, original book."
-Jodi Picoult, NYT bestselling author of VANISHING ACTS and MY SISTER'S KEEPER

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SOUTHERN AUTHOR? AUTHOR WHO WRITES IN THE SOUTH? ABOUT THE SOUTH? THE NEW SOUTH? WAIT, HOW DID I GET HERE?

Hollywood has a way of reducing a book to one sentence.They call it alog-line.They toss around terms like ‘Coming-of-age tale set in Maine’ or ‘Die Hard in a submarine.” I don’t think in such cogent soundbites.

Having moved all my life, first as an Air Force Brat, then a faculty wife, the fish-out-of-water concept expresses my own sense of belonging.Or not.

If you’re supposed to write about what you know, then being an outsider is exactly what I’m drawn to.I’m the person who wants to, but doesn’t really fit in.When Karin Gillespie invited me to contribute to her blog on Southern authors, I felt like an imposter, despite the fact that I live in the South and spent much of my childhood in Florida and Georgia. If you count seven years in Charlottesville, I have spent more time here than anywhere else.

My outsider role officially commenced in second grade.Having moved from England to Florida, every time I spoke in class, the other kidsturned around to stare at me, grabbing the backs of their chairs to steady themselves against the sound of thirty-two jaws dropped in amazement.Was it my English accent?The fish-belly-white-skin?Maybe it was the wildly curly, fiery-red hair that I refused to brush?

I was Carrot Top, but shorter, chubbier, without the fashion sense.

By the time we moved to Athens, Georgia, I’d learned to talk southern, but my hair was still an unsightly mess (one sister refused to acknowledge my existence) and my skin a mortifying morass of freckles.We went to a tiny Catholic school down the street from the Ku Klux Klan storefront (location, location, location) and came to love the town that would later produce R.E.M. and the B-52s.

Athens’ most enduring cultural export, however, as readers of MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL may recall, is the Georgia Bulldogs.For my family, an embarrassingly large Catholic brood adrift in a sea of Southern Baptists, football became a way for us to feel connected.Even if we didn’t have roots that went back generations, at least on Saturday afternoons each Fall, we knew who we were and how we belonged.That Vince Dooley went to our church and drove in our carpool meant we felt connected in an even deeper way, for if the legendary football coach could be different yet revered, maybe there was a chance for the rest of us as well.

The Dawgs were so important to all of us that when we moved to Ohio in 1970, a room of our family’s house would be decorated in red and black, filled with Bulldog paraphenalia and called the Georgia room.Christmas gifts routinely include, to this day, UGA teeshirts, flip flops and car flags.Three siblings have real Bulldogs, one of whom is named Herschel, after the Heismann trophy running back.When my brother Tom, the biggest sports fan of us all, was dying of cancer at the age of 32, he asked that his ashes be spread “between the hedges” of the UGA stadium, and that his funeral conclude with the bawdy, fight song, “LET THE BIG DAWG EAT!”

Something about that request spoke volumes, both of my brother and the way in which the Dawg zeitgiest could both rally and comfort us all.

After leaving Athens, it would be thirty years before I would return to the Deep South to live. Tallahassee, Florida is indisputably the most Southern of Florida’s cities, proving the truth of what they say about our state: the further north you go, the deeper south you get. We are also a football town, home to Florida State’s Seminoles (whose namesake tribe makes other old Southern families look like newcomer wannabees).

Yep, they were here first.Their resistence to having their history rewritten to favor the land-grabbing fish-belly-pale-skinned invaders who sought to displace them is legendary but what I find most interesting – as a migratory mutt from so many places – is how welcoming this original tribe was to outsiders.They harbored (and married) escaped slaves from Georgia plantations, they got along fine with several colonial deputations, it was just wholesale theft (disguised as fine print in treaties that – to this day – they’ve never signed) of their birthright (a.k.a. the pristine wilderness they farmed, hunted and built their homes on) that put their breechcloths in a twist.

Even now, the Seminole Nation is an inclusive bunch.When the NCAA declared sports teams could no longer use Native American symbols, the Tribe helped FSU gain an exemption, viewing the use of their name as a means of allowing their traditional culture to endure, even as so much else in Florida has changed.

I think a lot about what it means to be a Southerner, and what it means to belong to a place.Can I, as a transplant, a geographic dilletante, allow myself to belong here?If so, what does that mean?Do I have to give up my notion – fondly held for so long – that the real South is a place where nothing ever changes?

After all, we all know how many southerners it takes to screw in a lightbulb.A thousand.One to replace the bulb, nine hundred and ninety-nine to go on and on about how much better the old one was.

I’ve loved that notion, that the South I’d found in childhood remained intact.No strip malls, fast food clones or acid rain.We could delete the bigotry, of course, and disappear the Klan, but other than that, the notion of a place untouched by time, trouble, traffic or cancer seemed worth grasping onto, even if it meant I’d always exist on the outside, looking in and hoping what I glimpsed wasn’t a complete mirage.

Only lately have I wrestled with the possibility that my outsider status was also a means of avoiding responsibility.I was on the phone with my sister in Atlanta, who said the recent drought and the water wars between Florida, Georgia and Alabamba reminded her of my novel’s description of similar battles out West.

“It’s too many people.Atlanta can’t just keep growing,” I said, even as it occurred to me that I’dofficially become the Southern version of a Zoni, the native Arizonan’s term for newcomers so infatuated with the desert’s beauty that their first impulse was to stop all other newcomers from ever stepping foot across the state border

Pulling up the moat is a common impulse, and obviously not feasible.Yet neither is the head-in-the-sand or hands-thrown-up-fatalistically-against-progress that has enabled so much sprawl in so little time.This being said, there are solutions, fairly easy ones, that could protect what’s left of our water, preserve open spaces and cleanse what’s left of our air while uniting all of us – the old and the new southerners – with a fighting team spirit that could do us all proud.

Perhaps, given poetic license and the creative adaptativity of the Seminoles, who realized that nothing was worth fighting over but the land that gives us all life, perhaps each of us latecomers can decide we are in fact true Southerners, by choice, if not by birth.Even if we didn’t outnumber those who can trace their granddaddies back to the same local farmstead, it’s a communal responsibility to protect what’s most precious from simple stupidity, waste and neglect.Otherwise, those fish-out-of-water stories might become just a tad too close for comfort.

(Sheila Curran’s DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN was published by Penguin in 2005. Her second novel, LUCY VARGAS IS COMING AROUND, will be published by ATRIA, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.)

Yesterday, my daughter and I went to the funeral of a neighbor of ours. Brenda Luca was my age, give or take a year, and she has twin fifth grade boys, a Portugese Water Dog, a wonderful husband and more friends and family than the huge Catholic church down the street could comfortably hold. She had breast cancer, but as someone else pointed out, it never had her. The woman was amazing. Cheerful, funny, thoughtful, generous, and happier in her short life than most people would be in twice that time. She had a gift. Even in the last year, when her treatments started to intensify, she was running school volunteer projects and raising money to help uninsured cancer patients with medical bills. her husband gave a great eulogy and asked each of the funeral members to pass along in their lives the same generosity of spirit they'd experienced from Brenda, whether it meant being a little more patient with the salesclerk or choosing to be kind even when we've had a bad day. I thought that was wonderful.

When I realized it was time to blog for Alison Scotch Winn, I couldn't help but notice the timing was perfect, since breast cancer figures largely in THE DEPARTMENT OF LOST AND FOUND

"Scotch handles the topic of cancer with humor and hope, never dipping into the maudlin. The changes and realizations that the characters make are profound and moving. An impressive debut." – Booklist

Funny and frank. A serious comedy that shines light into the darkness." - The Tampa Tribune

"[The Department of Lost & Found] does a good service to readers showing how breast cancer, while physically devastating, can strengthen one's resolve and give life a new meaning." - Mamm Magazine

"A great way to kick off your summer reading. Editors' choice." – Redbook

"Smart and well-written.” - Marie Claire

"Too good to pass up. You'll laugh a lot (and cry just a little) as Natalie rebounds from the big C and reinvents her life." – Cosmopolitan

Here's our interview:

If I had to offer two bumper sticker explanations for my novel, they’d be “Appearances are deceiving” and “Mean people suck.” Tell me what your slogans would be, and why.

What a fun question! Okay, the first would be, “You always have a choice.” In The Department of Lost and Found, several characters find themselves at crossroads, and when faced with these potentially life-altering moments, some of them fall back into old habits and patterns, letting life dictate their path rather than grabbing hold and steering it down the path that they truly were meant for. Eventually, as the book goes on, some of these characters realize that life is all about choices, and even when it seems like the odds are stacked against you, it’s these very choices that can flip everything back around. To that end, the second bumper sticker would read, “You have you grant yourself good fortune.” Hmmm, maybe that sounds more like a fortune cookie note, but still, I’m sticking with it. Similar to what I noted above, as these characters wade through their lives and their screw-ups and their failures, many of them, particularly the heroine, Natalie, realize that life is what you make of it, not vice versa, and she truly begins to understand that good luck can come to you when you seek it out.

2)Your two favorite movies over the past twelve months and why?

Oh man, I’m a parent to two young kids, so I really have to pick and choose my movies carefully. Hmmm, okay, I’ll go with Waitress, because I think I should be the president of the Keri Russell fan club, and her work in this movie is magnificent, and on the complete other end of the spectrum, Gone Baby, Gone, which I just saw last weekend. Ben Affleck completely redeems himself for his Gigli phase, and I couldn’t get the movie – the acting, the themes, the images – out of my head for days.

What was the one thing you learned in getting your book published that you were really surprised to find out?

How difficult it is to get the damn thing published in the first place! Truly, before I got on the hamster wheel, I had a vague idea of how vigorous the process was, but until I saw it up close – how many people need to approve the sale of the book, for example – I had no idea what I was up against. I was amazed that I got even one offer, much less that the book went to auction. That said, I don’t mean to be discouraging: hey, books get bought every day, and there’s no reason that yours can’t be the next one sold.

If you had to pick one and only one condition (beyond computer or pen and paper) that would allow you to write would it be: a. solitude b. caffiene c. sleep d. food e. sex or f. ______.

This one is easy for me. Sleep. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been unable to function without proper shut-eye. Seriously, if I got less than nine hours of sleep in high school, I’d take a sick day. These days, my bedroom is like a shrine to my sleeping habits – it cracks my husband up. I have my eye-shade, my white noise machine, my ear plugs…you name it, I use it to ensure that I’m well-rested.

The irony, of course, is that with two little kids, I’m never well-rested, but I certainly give it the old college try. And without even the amount of sleep I now get, I’m a complete disaster with my writing.

Do you have a favorite genre? If so, who are your three favorite writers? If not, who are your three favorite writers and how have they influenced your work?

I guess you could say that my favorite genre would be commercial women’s fiction, but really, I’m not so sure about that. I admire writers such as Lolly Winston, Ann Packer and Amanda Eyre Ward, but this summer, for example, I found myself reading a slew of male writers: Jonathan Tropper, Joshua Ferris, Larry Doyle, etc. So really, I just like anything that grabs me and is a relatively quick read. As much as I wish that I could inhale the nuances of highly literary works, well, I a) don’t have the time and b) probably don’t have the attention span!